{"id":11234,"date":"2013-06-14T11:18:57","date_gmt":"2013-06-14T18:18:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/?p=11234"},"modified":"2013-06-14T11:18:57","modified_gmt":"2013-06-14T18:18:57","slug":"there-is-no-classical-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/14\/there-is-no-classical-world\/","title":{"rendered":"There Is No Classical World"},"content":{"rendered":"

Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter is a fun place. It’s led by people like John Preskill, Jeff Kimble, and Alexei Kitaev — some of the world’s great scientists — so you know the physics is going to be top-notch. But it’s the youngsters, such as postdoc Spiros Michalakis<\/a>, who are bringing the fun. Suff like the IQIM blog<\/a> (where you should read John’s recent post on the Maldadcena\/Susskind wormhole proposal<\/a>) and a successful Kickstarter campaign for science-inspired fashion<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The fun is now being ratcheted up even higher, as IQIM is teaming<\/a> with Jorge Cham<\/a> of PhD Comics fame<\/a> to make a series of animated web videos about quantum mechanics. I ask you, who doesn’t love some good videos about quantum mechanics??<\/p>\n

Sensibly, they’ve kicked off by spotlighting an interesting experimental result, rather than diving right into the realms of esoteric theoretical speculation. Of course, this is quantum mechanics we’re talking about, so even the experiments get pretty wild in their implications. The work is by Amir Safavi-Naeini and Oskar Painter<\/a>, who take a small mirror and put it into a quantum state where its center of mass is as cold as it is possible to be. Classically, of course, the mirror can be perfectly still; quantum-mechanically, there is a ground state wave function that still shows “fluctuations” (i.e. the fact that observations won’t always show zero motion). <\/p>\n

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Doing The Impossible<\/div><\/div>
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